Friday, May 22, 2009

Come join me and Charles
Chen
at
Google I/O2009
at our session on
Looking
Beyond The Screen (YouTube Preview
where we will describe some of our work on eyes-free interaction
on Android. We'll be around during most of Google I/O, so if you
are interested in eyes-free interaction ranging from Emacspeak to
Fire-Vox, or anything else eyes-free, feel free to grab us in the
hallways.
Looking forward to seeing you there!

Abstract: Looking Beyond The Screen

Looking Beyond The Screen

Project Eyes-Free aims to enable fluent eyes-free use of mobile
devices running Android. Target uses range from eyes-busy
environments like in-car use to users who are unwilling to or
incapable of looking at the visual display --- see For The Blind, Technology Does What A Guide Dog Can't, NYTimes, January
4, 2009, for a high-level overview. As described in that article,
we are releasing components from project Eyes-Free as they become
ready for end-user deployment. This announcement marks the first
public release of the eyes-free shell on the Android
Marketplace, though the underlying source code has been available
for some time from the code repository at Google Code Hosting.

Here is a brief overview of the end-user affordances provided in
this release:

An Eyes-Free Shell for conveniently launching talking applications.

A collection of useful talking applications that turn an
Android phone into an eyes-free communication device --- see
subsequent sections for an overview of these
applications. Note that thes eapplications have been written
to be both useful to end-users as well as to help the
developper community to come up to speed with developing
eyes-free applications for Android.

We will be uploading video tutorials demonstrating the use of
these applications to YouTube --- please see the project
Web site for these links as they become available.

Talking Dialer

A key innovation is the use of the touch screen to enable
one-handed, eyes-free dialing of phone numbers using the touch
screen --- see Miguel Helft's NY Times article cited above for a good
layman's description of the technique. The talking dialer comes
with a talking phone-book that enables users to quickly select a
desired contact using the touch screen.

Knowing Your Location

This mini-application announces your present location based on
information acquired via GPS and the cell network. It speaks your
current heading using the built-in magnetic compass, looks up the
current location on Google Maps, and announces the location in
terms of a nearby address and street intersection.

Device State

This mini-application announces useful information such as
battery state, signal
strength, and availability of WiFi networks.

Date And Time

This mini-application provides single-touch access to current
date and time.

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and as of
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What Is It?

Emacspeak is a fully functional audio desktop that provides
complete eyes-free access to all major 32 and 64 bit operating
environments. By seamlessly blending all aspects of the Internet
such as Web-surfing and electronic messaging into the audio
desktop, Emacspeak enables speech access to local and remote
information with a consistent and well-integrated user
interface. A rich suite of task-oriented
tools provides efficient speech-enabled access to the
evolving service-oriented Web cloud.